Bryan Gaensler: A New Way of Looking at the Sky

Since the time of Galileo, we’ve built bigger and bigger telescopes to look at the night sky but still don’t know that much about the universe it reflects back, or how it evolved. We do know it’s changing quite quickly.

For instance, in December 2004, a little star many light years away gave off a sudden flash knocking out satellite communications across the world. For a quarter of a second, it was a thousand times brighter than The Milky Way. Explosions like this happen everyday, but astronomers aren’t seeing them happen or understanding much about them.

Australian astronomer Bryan Gaensler is promoting a new approach to this problem … what’s called “all sky astronomy”. In his TEDx Sydney talk, he outlines how an Aussie team of his star-gazing colleagues have set up pioneering technology to achieve this. And, how the discoveries they might make will be out of this world.

Bryan Gaensler is an award-winning astronomer and passionate science communicator, who is internationally recognised for his groundbreaking work on dying stars, interstellar magnets and cosmic explosions. A former Young Australian of the Year, NASA Hubble Fellow and Harvard professor, Gaensler is now an Australian Laureate Fellow at The University of Sydney, and is also Director of the Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics. He gave the 2001 Australia Day Address, was named one of Sydney's 100 most influential people for 2010. In 2011, he was awarded Australia's Pawsey Medal for outstanding research by a physicist aged under 40.